Team Science

Fascinating article in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal last week on how scientific research is being performed by larger and larger teams, and the complexity and complications that creates.

The [Large Hadron Collider] atom smasher is so large that a brief status report lists 2,900 authors, so complex that scientists in 34 countries have readied 100,000 computers to process its data, and so fragile that a bird dropping a bread crust can short-circuit its power supply – as occurred earlier this month.

Its large research teams operate on such an elaborate scale that project management has become one of science’s biggest challenges.

Of course that’s an exceptionally large project, but an overall trend is beginning to forma as well.

Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Scientists are experimenting with the new technology of teamwork even in mathematics, where researchers customarily work alone.

To gauge the rise of team science, management experts [uh oh…] at Northwestern University recently analyzed 21 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. “… we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork,” says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzl.

Team science can get rather bizarre… if not dysfunctional. Let’s return to the Large Hadron Collider…

Its science teams, drawing on independent researchers, resources and funds from 150 universities and dozens of government agencies, already transcend the physics of conventional management.

Strictly speaking, no one is in charge.

Consider Tejinder Virdee, who occupies the top spot in the organizational chart of the collider’s Compact Muon Solenoid Detector – an intricate 12,500-ton device the size of a medieval cathedral. At least 3,600 people from 183 institutes in 38 countries are involved. Ordinarily, Dr. Virdee might exercise considerable exeutive authority. Instead, he carries the misleading title of “spokesperson.” He was elected by researchers to negotiate with other groups on their behalf.

This concept extends to something of an extreme.

All around the collider, research groups organized themselves in democratic cooperatives, arranged in an anti-hierarchy. All deliberately are open – and exhaustive. Everyone gets their say no matter how long it takes.

“The entire collaboration will be authors of each and every publication,” says Andrew J. Lankford, the ATLAS deputy spokesperson.

Consider that for a moment. We like to tell you about innovative leadership structures, and this definitely is one.

Comments

I wonder if I can get a job as a racial diversity and fairness in science spokesperson for the assistant director of Italian Portuguese culture, in the ethnic and urban assistance department serving the Hadron Collider Atom Smasher Project’s Tribal Fairness Relief Center?

I used to believe consensus would always yield the best result. But it often derails the decision-making process and nothing is ever achieved. Frustration levels get high when there’s a clear lack of leadership and an unwillingness by anyone in senior management to make an executive decision and move on. Time’s a wastin’! Like my 2 year old son says (who loves clocks), “Tick-tock, tick-tock!”

Single-point management works, large team management doesn’t, but Wikipedia does. At what point does the team become large enough to become effective again? There is a point. It’s why the internet as a communication medium is successful – large groups can have their say with minimal friction to create an outcome.

The term crowd-sourcing sums this theory up nicely, and there have been some GREAT crowd-sourced results. Google Wave is an experiment in crowd-sourcing. Look at some of the notes coming out of conventions where the wave was open for anyone to edit it…they are better than what any single person (even an expert in the field) could have put together.

So at what size do teams become productive again? I think 3900 may be above that threshold.

A crowd-sourced effort is more about the goal or specific problem and less about the goal of each individual (ie, make sure my name is on the publication, my idea is used in the analysis, etc). Similar to the focus of a continuous improvement group, a crowd-source effort tries to whittle away at a problem until it reaches a solution. This scientific conglomerate, on the other hand, seems to be more about ensuring everyone gets a say or gets their name on the results while minimizing hurt feelings or egos. In the end I think it depends on the constraints you put in place and how people are kept to those constraints. Good constraints will keep the group focused on the problem and potentially create an environment for innovation, a lack of constraints will allow people to fly off in a thousand individual directions – basically the exact opposite of crowd-sourcing.

There has to be an obvious limit to the practicality of the size of a team. Too large and it becomes too ineffecient. Too small and you lose innovation, creativity, and teamwork. So I wounder what would that limit be? Is it 3,600 people from 183 institutes in 38 countries. That seems rather large.